'Old Faithful' Sunspot to Fire Off More Solar Flares, Scientists Say

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An active region of the sun that blasted out powerful solar
storms four days in a row last week likely isn't done yet,
scientists say.

Officially, the flare-spouting region is called
sunspot 1283. But space weather experts have dubbed it "Old
Faithful," after the famous geyser in the United States'
Yellowstone National Park that goes off like clockwork. And the
solar Old Faithful should erupt again before it dissipates,
researchers said.

"It still has a fair amount of complexity," said solar physicist
C. Alex Young of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Md. "So we still have a pretty good chance of seeing some more
stuff from this one." [ Photos:
Sunspots on Earth's Closest Star ]

An active sunspot

Sunspots are temporary dark patches on the solar surface caused
by intense magnetic activity. Some last for hours before
disappearing; others linger for days, weeks or even months.

Powerful solar storms often
erupt from sunspots. These include radiation-flinging solar
flares and phenomena known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) —
massive clouds of solar plasma that can streak through space at
up to 3 million mph (5 million kph).

From Sept. 5-8, sunspot 1283 produced four big flares and three
CMEs. Two of the flares were X-class events and two were M-class
flares. (Strong solar flares are classified according to a
three-tiered system: X-class are the most powerful, M-class are
of medium strength and C-class are the weakest.)

While the rapid motion previously observed in sunspot 1283 seems
to have died down a bit, Young said, the sunspot looks poised to
erupt again sometime soon.

"There's a good probability that we're still going to see at
least another M-class flare, possibly another X-class flare,"
Young told SPACE.com.

It's not uncommon for sunspots to pop off a number of powerful
flares in quick succession the way 1283 has done, he added. That
seems to be the natural order of things.

"When you see one big flare, your chances of seeing another one
are pretty good," Young said.

Learning more about solar storms

Solar flares directed at Earth can cause temporary
radio-communication blackouts. CMEs have even greater destructive
potential; they can spawn geomagnetic storms that disrupt GPS
signals, radio communications and power grids. [ Sun's
Wrath: Worst Solar Storms in History ]

So researchers are working hard to better understand sun storms,
with the aim of one day being able to predict them with a great
deal of accuracy and a long lead time. But they're not there yet.

"We still have a long way to go to really have the kind of
forecasting capabilities that we have with terrestrial weather,"
Young said.

That's not to say scientists aren't making progress. Indeed,
they've learned a lot about
solar eruptions lately, Young said. And the knowledge base
will continue to grow, he added, as a fleet of sun-watching
spacecraft beam home more and more observations of Earth's star.

"We're really in a great time right now in terms of the data that
we have," Young said, citing the contributions of spacecraft such
as NASA's STEREO and Solar Dynamics Observatory, as well as SOHO,
a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency. "It's
going to be pretty exciting, from a solar physics and a space
weather point of view."

All of these eyes on the sun should be treated to quite a show
over the next several years. Solar activity has been ramping up
over the last few months as the
sun works toward a maximum in its 11-year activity cycle.

Scientists expect the peak of the current cycle, which is known
as Solar Cycle 24, to come in 2013.

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on
Twitter:@michaeldwall.
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